A Home with a History: how Christabel MacGreevy nurtured a “matriarchy of colour” in her north London flat

As dictated by her lease when she bought it, Christabel MacGreevy couldn’t change the bones of her flat in north London, but the artist has still managed to give the space a total kaleidoscopic overhaul. “When you come in, it feels all-encompassing – and that’s just because of the texture and the colour,” she explains from her sitting room. (True to her word, the space is bottle green in both texture and colour, having been lacquered in vitreous gloss.) Having grown up surrounded by female artists with strong feelings about palettes and pattern, Christabel met her renovation project with childlike excitement – and an inherited colour expertise. “It’s been like having a doll’s house,” she beams, recalling the simple joys of decorating.

Constructed in 1874 by a local builder named Matthew Allen, Christabel’s flat (along with a dozen of her surrounding neighbours’) formed part of a plan to encourage the middle classes to consider living in shared dwellings. Allen pioneered the idea of “cottage-flats”: purpose-built apartments disguised as quaint, suburban houses. Christabel is today reaping the rewards of Allen’s purpose-built innovation: hers has its own idyllic front balcony lined with Venetian cloister-style windows. At the same time, though, the artist has decided to rail against the flat’s old-world uniformity, using brilliant colours, patterns, artwork and found objects to create a distinct cocoon of a home.

Having shared a childhood bedroom with her sister and then later hopped between flat shares in London, Christabel was delighted to be moving into her own space during lockdown – but she had no idea how her style would manifest. “Now I’m in, it’s so obvious to me. But before, I’d had no space to take control of – how would I know what it would end up like?” Some indication for her passion for colour and texture can be gleaned from her work. As a maker of subversive images and sculptures, Christabel enjoys taking traditional practices – such as quilt-making or ceramics – and turning them on their head to make wild, freeform objects that challenge the medium. She decorated her flat with a similarly nonconformist and laidback attitude. “When I moved in, I suddenly realised I didn’t have any furniture!”

And so she set about filling her doll’s house, collecting furniture from flea markets, junk shops, antique stores and house clearances (“A sofa for £1? The perfect price!”). She explains how growing up surrounded by an old English aesthetic has informed her love of timeless style, and she’d always prefer to reupholster furniture than be distracted by what’s new or fashionable.

Christabel credits this attitude to her mum, who “never bought new things”. “It was not a case of ‘We could really get a better this or that’, rather: ‘We have a sofa, so why would we need a new one?’ It was the opposite of the throwaway culture of today.” In resistance to what she calls “unnecessary consumerism”, lots of Christabel’s most prized possessions are presents or inherited items, from an old armchair she has grand plans to re-cover in a floral print (“I want this room to feel like an indoor garden”), to some Holy Water from her parents’ pilgrimages to Lourdes. In the sitting room, an undulating wooden nude given to Christabel by her artist grandmother, Anthea Craigmyle, now sits as the focal point, instead of a telly. “I now have to go to my sister’s place to watch TV,” she laughs.

While much of her furniture is old, Christabel is all for a new lick of paint. “I’ve redone my bedroom five times,” she chuckles, recalling her hunt for “the perfect shade of yellow”. Her perpetual quest for the best is an admirable one – and it means her flat now has a palette that’s spot on. The guest bedroom has been cast in Little Greene’s marshmallowy ‘Confetti’, while the kitchen’s vibrant satsuma comes courtesy of ‘Mikado’ by Papers and Paints. And that perfect yellow? ‘Babushka’ by Farrow & Ball – “bright but not neon”. Christabel recommends not scrimping on good-quality paint, as it will last well and ensures the boldest shades.

She credits her penchant for bright shades to her grandmother, whose house sits vividly at the front of her memory. “Her sitting room was a really deep orange. It was painted in a very 1970s style – scumbled, so the walls were textured, like an oil painting,” Christabel reflects. “It looked like Rothko had painted the walls. And she had a big chandelier with glass beads that reflected all the orange – everything was very intentional and intense.”

“I love colour. I think about it a lot,” Christabel adds (as if we had any doubts). Here, her preoccupation finds expression not just on the walls, but on the geometrically painted floors – an idea Christabel stole from her mum, which ingeniously allows her to cover the less attractive modern floorboards beneath. The soft furnishings similarly reflect her chromatic interests too, not least her hand-stitched Pakistani textile, imported by Jess Maybury, and the abundance of art, from a lacy quilt made by Christabel, whose pink florals sing against the sitting room’s green walls, to the primary-coloured woolly tapestries of nautical scenes by Colin Millington.

She credits her female relatives for her “pedantic obsession” with colour. They all have an appreciation for the ways in which a palette has the power to “completely reconstruct the way you experience and inhabit a space,” Christabel explains. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find the family sitting around the dining table exchanging paint swatches, debating whether something is the right shade of pink. And her vibrant flat reflects this matriarchy of colour, where bold and lively shades are picked deftly, decisively and with inherited confidence.

Further reading

Christabel’s joint show with Rafaela de Ascanio, ‘Sexing the Cherry’, is on display at Tristan Hoare Gallery, 6 Fitzroy Square, London W1 until 28 April

Christabel on Instagram